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Macbook World of Warcraft Performance Thread?
- Thread starter Akita
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I just got hold of the WoW 10-day demo and have installed it on both OS X and Windows XP using boot camp.
I'm running the baseline 1.83 macbook with 512 meg of RAM.
In OS X, with all other apps turned off, and with EVERY setting down the lowest it will go (and the energy savings stuff set to 'better performance') I get an average of 9-10 FPS. It drops to about 5-6 FPS in cities and towns, and up to 15-20 FPS when lookng and stuff with no detail (out to sea etc).
In XP, with all video settings down to minimum, I get a steady 20-30 FPS. It drops to the 15 mark in city and high-detail places, but it's rare that it drops to 10 FPS or less. In low-detail areas, the FPS can go over 40FPS. It also seems o look a little bit nicer, too (even though it's exactly the same settings).
It's a bit annoying to find such a massive improvement when using XP - I'd rather stay in OSX for as long as possible, but I have to reboot if I want a satisfying experience with WoW. Admittedly, WoW remains quite playable on really low FPS (i can thing of games that would be suicide to play at 9 FPS), but if I have the choice, I'd rather boot into win and have a fluid play experience.
My guess is that it comes down to 2 factors - Apple have limited the GPU RAM to 64 meg, while it's allowed the full 128 meg in XP (any news on whether/when Apple are going to fix this?) which obviously makes for quite a difference, and Windows is also known for having more mature drivers (DirectX etc) when it comes to 3d gaming support.
I hope Apple see this as a challenge and work on improving their gaming capabilities, but for now I'll be using XP when I play.
I'm running the baseline 1.83 macbook with 512 meg of RAM.
In OS X, with all other apps turned off, and with EVERY setting down the lowest it will go (and the energy savings stuff set to 'better performance') I get an average of 9-10 FPS. It drops to about 5-6 FPS in cities and towns, and up to 15-20 FPS when lookng and stuff with no detail (out to sea etc).
In XP, with all video settings down to minimum, I get a steady 20-30 FPS. It drops to the 15 mark in city and high-detail places, but it's rare that it drops to 10 FPS or less. In low-detail areas, the FPS can go over 40FPS. It also seems o look a little bit nicer, too (even though it's exactly the same settings).
It's a bit annoying to find such a massive improvement when using XP - I'd rather stay in OSX for as long as possible, but I have to reboot if I want a satisfying experience with WoW. Admittedly, WoW remains quite playable on really low FPS (i can thing of games that would be suicide to play at 9 FPS), but if I have the choice, I'd rather boot into win and have a fluid play experience.
My guess is that it comes down to 2 factors - Apple have limited the GPU RAM to 64 meg, while it's allowed the full 128 meg in XP (any news on whether/when Apple are going to fix this?) which obviously makes for quite a difference, and Windows is also known for having more mature drivers (DirectX etc) when it comes to 3d gaming support.
I hope Apple see this as a challenge and work on improving their gaming capabilities, but for now I'll be using XP when I play.
Actually, XP allows 256 megs for the onboard graphics. I've got 2gb of RAM in my Macbook and in Windows I can run WoW maxed out (at least as far as the system is capable - no shaders) at native resolution and it's between 25-40fps in most environments and about 12-15fps in Ironforge. And this is on Lightning's Blade, which is an overpopulated server.
There's just a huge disparity in Mac/XP game performance at the moment.
There's just a huge disparity in Mac/XP game performance at the moment.
On my 1GHz G4 TiBook with 64mb Radeon 9000, I usually get around 13fps. It goes from as low as 5fps up to 29fps. All settings on low, 1280x864.
My 24" iMac better run it at 832745823748fps.
My 24" iMac better run it at 832745823748fps.
Funny how my ancient 600mhz G4 Cube can run it better than a brand new Macbook. Just goes to show how much difference a video card can make.
It's entirely about video card
As a lot of people here are implying, this game is all about video card.
I decided to setup a "secondard wow box" for when friends come over.. I scrounged together a P3 933, 640mb ram, ATI Radeon 7000 (64mb AGP).
With minimal settings and all sorts of cool performance tweaks every where, the best I could get was about 0-2fps in IF and I'd max out at about 15fps if I was in the middle of a field somewhere.
Then I spent $40 on a Radeon 9250 AGP card with 128mb video ram. The game now is fully playable. I've got all the video settings up there, not all the way, but a bit higher than "half" and the game is totally fluid. IF, as harsh as it is, gets it down to about 8-10fps and elsewhere of course outperform my primary wow machine (cause I run it at 2560x1024 -- (2*1280x1024 with everything maxed) and runs at 20-30fps.
That said, I'm very curious if WOW runs natively on OSX? If it's going through rosetta, then I'd be shocked that it could do more than give the login screen. But seriously, I expect that's exactly how it's working in OSX since (I BELIEVE) you install it the same way you would for a power pc. If that is infact what's happening, then we need to worship apple, cause that'd be some outright completely mastery coding.
That said, I only ordered my macbook yesterday. I simply couldn't push for more than the base 1.83 with 1gig for ram - though, I expect this to be able to hack the game fully, just may need some clever tweaking. The GMA card really isn't meant for gaming. We have to keep that in mind and not whine too much. Apple would gave picked this card to save on cost of production and probably space, heat, power and so on - fits the "profile" for the macbook better. Those of us who are serious about gaming, should get a macbook pro. But of course, it never works that way. I wonder if finding a way to up Wow's priority in OSX would help? With everything closed, it shouldn't matter, but you never really know.
Maybe when I get my mac I can look in to some other forums and goof around - see if there's simply some magical plain text file on OSX or something somewhere that actually sets the video ram allocation. ha ha ha ha, I'm SURE it's something they built in to the kernel.
As a lot of people here are implying, this game is all about video card.
I decided to setup a "secondard wow box" for when friends come over.. I scrounged together a P3 933, 640mb ram, ATI Radeon 7000 (64mb AGP).
With minimal settings and all sorts of cool performance tweaks every where, the best I could get was about 0-2fps in IF and I'd max out at about 15fps if I was in the middle of a field somewhere.
Then I spent $40 on a Radeon 9250 AGP card with 128mb video ram. The game now is fully playable. I've got all the video settings up there, not all the way, but a bit higher than "half" and the game is totally fluid. IF, as harsh as it is, gets it down to about 8-10fps and elsewhere of course outperform my primary wow machine (cause I run it at 2560x1024 -- (2*1280x1024 with everything maxed) and runs at 20-30fps.
That said, I'm very curious if WOW runs natively on OSX? If it's going through rosetta, then I'd be shocked that it could do more than give the login screen. But seriously, I expect that's exactly how it's working in OSX since (I BELIEVE) you install it the same way you would for a power pc. If that is infact what's happening, then we need to worship apple, cause that'd be some outright completely mastery coding.
That said, I only ordered my macbook yesterday. I simply couldn't push for more than the base 1.83 with 1gig for ram - though, I expect this to be able to hack the game fully, just may need some clever tweaking. The GMA card really isn't meant for gaming. We have to keep that in mind and not whine too much. Apple would gave picked this card to save on cost of production and probably space, heat, power and so on - fits the "profile" for the macbook better. Those of us who are serious about gaming, should get a macbook pro. But of course, it never works that way. I wonder if finding a way to up Wow's priority in OSX would help? With everything closed, it shouldn't matter, but you never really know.
Maybe when I get my mac I can look in to some other forums and goof around - see if there's simply some magical plain text file on OSX or something somewhere that actually sets the video ram allocation. ha ha ha ha, I'm SURE it's something they built in to the kernel.
I currently play WoW on the Macbook 2.0ghz and have 1gb ram installed. The game seems to play very poorly to my standards with 15 fps average sometimes getting to around 30 but getting to as low as 4 fps. I have everything set on the lowest graphics and also tried running WoW on bootcamp. I saw an improvement of about +10fps on the Windows version, but I hate Windows now that I just turned into a Mac User this summer and would rather not have to turn off my computer to play my favorite game WoW for an hour then switch back. I wanted to ask you guys if there were any people who have played WoW on a macbook with 2gb ram, and if they have what the performance was and what kind of ram they were using. I am thinking about upgrading to 2gb if I see the game playing on OSX at 20-30fps average, but if it does I don't know what kind of Ram to get. I have my eyes set on some Corsair Valueselect which is cheap but I don't know if it runs worse then if I were to get another brand. Any tips would be great!
More RAM won't improve your framerates - they will only help to smooth the game out in the event of disk thrashing (running out of memory, and paging to disk). I don't think you'll see a significant improvement in going to 2GB of RAM at all.
its simple friends. macbook isnt a game/graphics machine. if you want that. need macbook pro.
same with mac mini. or even the stock imac. if you want a better game computer need imac 24" with better graphics card.
same with mac mini. or even the stock imac. if you want a better game computer need imac 24" with better graphics card.
I play WOW on the 24 inch iMac. It is totally sqeced out. I won't even say the FPS i've seen because you wouldn't believe me. I used to play on a 12inch powerbook, and I didn't think it was all that bad. With my settings set to low I could get about 30ish FPS
I just want to point out that running dual channel capable RAM modules (which the Macbook is capable of) will in most cases give a significant perfomance boost to all memory intensive tasks, such as WoW.
That said, it matters what kind of RAM you put into the laptop. The 64mb shared memory that goes with the GMA 950 GPU is more than enough to handle that game in particular, because the memory supported by the Macbook runs at up to 667 mhz (DDR2)--a very common type of RAM to go with nowadays average graphics cards (non-onboards).
It is true though that the chip itself is nothing great, but it is certainly not bad either combined with a powerful CPU. Likewise, an awesome graphics card is not nearly as effective if the CPU (and memory) is low-end.
That said, it matters what kind of RAM you put into the laptop. The 64mb shared memory that goes with the GMA 950 GPU is more than enough to handle that game in particular, because the memory supported by the Macbook runs at up to 667 mhz (DDR2)--a very common type of RAM to go with nowadays average graphics cards (non-onboards).
It is true though that the chip itself is nothing great, but it is certainly not bad either combined with a powerful CPU. Likewise, an awesome graphics card is not nearly as effective if the CPU (and memory) is low-end.
not a WoW fan, but downloaded the 10 day trial. have it running on a mini upgraded with a core 2 duo @ 2ghz, 2gb ram, and 7200rpm hd. running around outside i am getting 58-60 fps. inside/busy scenes drop some. have seen a low of 38, but again, not a player, so take this for what it's worth. seemed very playable, even during the busy scenes.
that's actually quite awesome, given that the mini still has a GMA 950. I guess the core 2 duo is pretty great. What resolution? What settings?
having the same 950 was the reason for the post... macbook without a screen if you will.
i honestly don't know what settings, and i am not near the computer for a week or so due to the holiday. i went with whatever settings were at install, or don't remember changing anything. i ran around the first few areas looking for high activity or lots of players to try and push the 950, and got the results posted. hope it helps.
can tell you that the difference between the core solo and core 2 duo was really dramatic in several windows games. farcry demo jungle loop was running full/full at around 200fps according to fraps after the upgrade. not bad for a silent 7" square!
Wow on Mac
I just wanted to add my World of Warcraft on Mac story. I first played WOW on a mini mac 1.6ghz with a gig of RAM. I needed to turn all the settings down in order to play it. At the time I didn't know better so I played it. When I would go into major capital cities the frame rate sucked and lagged a lot. Once I rebuilt my PC and was able to play WOW on all top settings I realized how badly it actually ran on the mini mac. So yes, you can play it on a mac but ignorance is bliss in that case because the quality suffers and you waste a lot of time waiting for the computer to catch up while it's graphics engine tries desperately to process the information.
I just wanted to add my World of Warcraft on Mac story. I first played WOW on a mini mac 1.6ghz with a gig of RAM. I needed to turn all the settings down in order to play it. At the time I didn't know better so I played it. When I would go into major capital cities the frame rate sucked and lagged a lot. Once I rebuilt my PC and was able to play WOW on all top settings I realized how badly it actually ran on the mini mac. So yes, you can play it on a mac but ignorance is bliss in that case because the quality suffers and you waste a lot of time waiting for the computer to catch up while it's graphics engine tries desperately to process the information.
WOW on Mac
Plain and simple, 5-10 fps is NOT good. If you have the patience then go for it but anything less then 15 is very irritating. I love Apple but Macbooks and Mini Macs are not meant for WOW and don't do the game justice.
Plain and simple, 5-10 fps is NOT good. If you have the patience then go for it but anything less then 15 is very irritating. I love Apple but Macbooks and Mini Macs are not meant for WOW and don't do the game justice.
I don't see how Azadre could be getting those kind of frame rates when everyone else is saying they are getting around 10-15 fps
X3100 is comparable to 2-3 year old low-end gpus, while it is a upgrade from the GMA950, it is still a onboard gpu, and a slow one that is.
I hear people saying "it runs great, I have 20-40 FPS all the time", but stating FPS means nothing unless you can tell what area you were in and what your video preferences were. I have a 400 MHz PM G4 (with GF4 MX card) that can do 25-30 FPS certain places in Ironforge, but if I use it in instances such as SSC, it will quickly go down to ~0,5 and sometimes freeze altogether.
My point is that some areas are much more demanding than others. Zones in Outlands are generally much more gpu-dependant than those in Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms. Even the most crowded areas in Ironforge cannot compare to some dungeons such as Serpenshrine Cavern. 10 FPS in Ironforge means unplayable in SSC. Sure, to a casual gamer who will never ever go to arenas or 25-man raids, a FPS of 20 in Hellfire Peninsula is more than sufficient to enjoy the game, but 15 FPS is not acceptable if you are to succeed in arena.
I am myself considering to buy a new MB, but since I want to play arenas with customized add-ons at decent framerates, I expect the MB to fall short. I will probably end up buying an MPB or build myself an PC gaming rig in addition buying to the MB.
Awh, posted in wrong thread, please ignore this.
I hear people saying "it runs great, I have 20-40 FPS all the time", but stating FPS means nothing unless you can tell what area you were in and what your video preferences were. I have a 400 MHz PM G4 (with GF4 MX card) that can do 25-30 FPS certain places in Ironforge, but if I use it in instances such as SSC, it will quickly go down to ~0,5 and sometimes freeze altogether.
My point is that some areas are much more demanding than others. Zones in Outlands are generally much more gpu-dependant than those in Kalimdor and Eastern Kingdoms. Even the most crowded areas in Ironforge cannot compare to some dungeons such as Serpenshrine Cavern. 10 FPS in Ironforge means unplayable in SSC. Sure, to a casual gamer who will never ever go to arenas or 25-man raids, a FPS of 20 in Hellfire Peninsula is more than sufficient to enjoy the game, but 15 FPS is not acceptable if you are to succeed in arena.
I am myself considering to buy a new MB, but since I want to play arenas with customized add-ons at decent framerates, I expect the MB to fall short. I will probably end up buying an MPB or build myself an PC gaming rig in addition buying to the MB.
Awh, posted in wrong thread, please ignore this.
I don't personally own a macbook but I have a friend who has one thats well over a year old. He only has 1gb RAM but it runs fine on his. He's done everything from Arena to 25-mans perfectly. The only problem he has had, as far as I know, is overheating. As far as I know, his settings aren't maxed out but they're not on minimun either. He runs an ample amount of mods also. Sure, he doesn't get 40-60 fps (don't know his exact framerate) but it certainly does not look laggy at any point. I'm sure you won't get the very best performance and very best graphics, but I'm very sure it's playable.
Don't know if my opinion counts for much, but I hope it helps a little.
Don't know if my opinion counts for much, but I hope it helps a little.
Wow Performance on my MACBook
I know its hard to find specifics on how well wow plays on different macs . So here is the stats for mine
2g white macbook with the gmaX3100 and 4gigs of ram ( ram is important since its shared with the video card )
Terrain distance is 50%
Spell detail high
Texture resolution high
Terrain detail low
All special effects are off
( everything else is either low or med )
In buildings i get 50-90fps
In ****/org ( busy city) 20-30fps
Running around most other places 30-40fps
PVP matches 20-40fps
* Occasionaly I do get some crazy graphical errors while im playing but they dont happen often enough to be a bother . Also you can just /console reloadui and it usually fixes the bug . Hope that helps
I know its hard to find specifics on how well wow plays on different macs . So here is the stats for mine
2g white macbook with the gmaX3100 and 4gigs of ram ( ram is important since its shared with the video card )
Terrain distance is 50%
Spell detail high
Texture resolution high
Terrain detail low
All special effects are off
( everything else is either low or med )
In buildings i get 50-90fps
In ****/org ( busy city) 20-30fps
Running around most other places 30-40fps
PVP matches 20-40fps
* Occasionaly I do get some crazy graphical errors while im playing but they dont happen often enough to be a bother . Also you can just /console reloadui and it usually fixes the bug . Hope that helps